Carriers now beat all escorts in PVE with the introduction of the JH-HEC and the JH-Dreadnaught.

I'm not so sure about the above... I still routinely take 1st place over carriers in Fleet Actions like SB24 and Gorn Mine Field using escorts. The key isn't how much DPS you can eventually get going... it's how fast you can burst down mission-specific targets.

..actually, there is. Problem is parsers dont read it as high dps since it focuses on 1 ship at a time and kills it quick... your dps set up is geared towards playing the numbers and just spamming mostly ineffective aoe damage. AOE beams are for tanks not for killing..unless you get the target by itself and all beams go fire at will on that one target (kinda never happens).

Point is, you aim the ship's nose at whatever and let autofire and elite scorps do its job. placing high yield torps and BO3 constantly.

The super stacked plasma dots from the torps and the constant damage of ferengi rockets and elite scorp cannons basically obliterate targets 1 by one in very,very short time. If you use the recall-attack trick with the scorps you can make them fire high yields all the time too.

I'm astonished that you think BFW doesn't do any high single target dps. It in fact does massive single target dps. We've been clocked at up to 60k single target sustained dps.

It's also not playing the numbers. Everything we hit dies incredibly fast. We are down to about a 4 min ISE and looking to go lower. Don't forget we are using 6 beam arrays all firing at the same time with bfw + beta + whatever buffs are up and with bonuses from doffs AND we are constantly dumping weapon power into the ship. This is unbeatable.

However I would love you to come stf so we can see your suggestions in effect!!! Feel free to add me to your friends and I'll organise a good time for us to stf.

So ... Would it be fair to say you put in $50 and expected to have a ship that no one else that didn't also pay the $50 buck could beat?

Not at all. Whay I did expected was a new, high-powered (a bit moreso than my F-TER) toy to bash Borg hardware with. What I got was a very attractive, but far less viable toy with what feels like equal firepower to my F-TER, that's more gimmicky to actually use.

With all of this more recent talk about how papery the Andy's are, and how some people actually LIKE it, I remembered that right after release with the shield/hull bugs in place, I wondered out loud why they seemed so much more fragile than other escorts I owned. More than a few folks responded that this condition was fine, that escorts SHOULD be death-boxes. You know what? After the patch, I haven't seen one complaint about how the line was ruined by being made more viable and fun to wear.

The moral of this story? People can get used to almost anything, even glaring errors in design, especially if those flaws suit their personal agendas. The Andy line plays like it was designed to avoid those bitter complaints from the PvP crowd that will come anyway, no matter what. In catering to this crowd they forgot that the many, the PvE crowd, just wanted a tad more DPS against the games AI, which doesn't get all weepy when its splashed by something new.

Not at all. Whay I did expected was a new, high-powered (a bit moreso than my F-TER) toy to bash Borg hardware with. What I got was a very attractive, but far less viable toy with what feels like equal firepower to my F-TER, that's more gimmicky to actually use.

With all of this more recent talk about how papery the Andy's are, and how some people actually LIKE it, I remembered that right after release with the shield/hull bugs in place, I wondered out loud why they seemed so much more fragile than other escorts I owned. More than a few folks responded that this condition was fine, that escorts SHOULD be death-boxes. You know what? After the patch, I haven't seen one complaint about how the line was ruined by being made more viable and fun to wear.

The moral of this story? People can get used to almost anything, even glaring errors in design, especially if those flaws suit their personal agendas. The Andy line plays like it was designed to avoid those bitter complaints from the PvP crowd that will come anyway, no matter what. In catering to this crowd they forgot that the many, the PvE crowd, just wanted a tad more DPS against the games AI, which doesn't get all weepy when its splashed by something new.